Investigating the Black Panther Case

Hans von Spakovsky / September 14, 2009

The Washington Times is reporting that the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) at the Department of Justice has opened an investigation into the dismissal of the voter-intimidation case against the New Black Panther party. Republican congressmen Lamar Smith and Frank Wolf, who have been doggedly pursuing the Civil Rights Division trying to get answers as to why this case (which had already been won by default) was dismissed, have expressed their relief that Justice is finally beginning to take this issue seriously (or at least is pretending to do so in order to shut down any objective investigations by Congress and the U.S. Civil Rights Commission).

Given the nature of the personnel who populate OPR, there is good reason to doubt that a real investigation will occur. Many of the career lawyers at OPR are as liberal and partisan as the lawyers who work in the Civil Rights Division. The report they issued in conjunction with the inspector general on supposed “political” hiring in the division was chock full of bias, inaccuracies, gross exaggerations, and deliberate misrepresentations of both facts and the law. Not only was the OPR attorney assigned to that investigation a liberal former Civil Rights Division lawyer, but the (now former) head of OPR who orchestrated this agitprop, Marshall Jarrett, was rewarded by Eric Holder when he became attorney general: Jarrett was made head of the Executive Office for United States Attorneys, a plum post that usually goes to a political appointee. (more…)